“Hello, (real) world” in PHP in 2017

    Hello World

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Make runs on Windows, OS X, Linux and Android.

How is a Makefile quite limited?

• make(1) has a hard time rebuilding target files when source files have changed. The problem is that users have to declare the dependencies of a target before the build, but due to file search paths, it can be that dependencies are only known after building a target. To know about all dependencies, make(1) would have to build any target at least twice.

• make(1) by default does not rebuild a target when its build rules change. While this seems really weird to me, it seems to be a consequence of having a single makefile. When a build rule is changed, the makefile changes. So should all targets depend on the makefile implicitly? One could argue that they should – but then each change in a makefile would rebuild all targets.

• make(1) can not handle non-existence dependencies. Imagine a file foo.h being searched for by a compiler in directories bar and baz (in that order). If the header file baz/foo.h is found, then bar/foo.h should be considered a non-existence dependency: If at any future point in time it exists, the target should be rebuilt.

These problems are all solved by DJB's redo approach, which I implemented in a few hundred lines of Bourne shell (/bin/sh): http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/bin/redo-sh.html

    
        
            Hello World
        
        
            Hello World
        
    

We make it more complicated for ourselves because we choose to make it more complicated. I'm not against modern frameworks but quite often I see people justifying them rather than using them when they become a requirement.

Worse yet, I'm often disappointed by the number of web developers I've worked along side recently that haven't understood how data is serialised in HTTP response and request headers (so they inappropriately use GET and POST methods), don't know even the basic few HTTP status codes, don't understand browser caching, etc and I end up having to handhold them through the basics while they're advocating complex frontend frameworks because "it does the logic for you" (or similar arguments).

This isn't a dig at all web developers by any means. I'm talking about a minority here. But it's a trend I've observed growing and I do think there is a correlation between the rise in popularity of bloated abstractions and the number of inexperienced developers using them as a crutch for their lack of understanding about the core principles of the web. The problem is the moment something misbehaves they're completely incapable of effectively problem solving it. And in the era of everything being a web browser, we have more low end devices than ever that we need to support - which often gets neglected when you have developers constantly opting for their shiny new toys resulting in cumulative page sizes of megabytes just to display "Hello World!".

So going back to my original point; yes I do think it can be simple to set up the kind of cross platform support you describe. I think it's often us who choose to make it complicated for ourselves. Often far more complicated than it ever needs to be.